Storyteller Relates The Wisdom Of African Folk Tales

February 19, 1999|By Tim Kane. Special to the Tribune.

CRYSTAL LAKE — Shanta, a storyteller and native South Side Chicagoan, says she didn't realize she had ancestors in Africa until she was 19. But through lore, she connected with her African forebears and now makes a living telling stories and singing songs passed down through generations.

As part of African-American History Month, Shanta on Wednesday gave a performance to students and faculty members in the Belly of the Whale coffee shop at McHenry County College in Crystal Lake.

Chanting and playing African instruments--droning gourds carved in Nigeria and a hollow cedar percussion blocks--Shanta related an old African fable in which a spider convinces a tiger to act like a horse and let the arachnid ride on the beast's back, causing mirth for the spider and humiliation for the tiger.

Joey Goode, 4, of Crystal Lake, who accompanied his mother to the performance, told Shanta that the spider might have an easier time riding the tiger if, perhaps, it had two reins instead of one.

"That could be," Shanta told Joey, "but he only had one."

Shanta also told a story, popular among the slaves, of a plantation on which hundreds of cotton pickers toiled in a field under the lash of a cruel overseer.

Those who were about to be whipped remembered a magic word and would be delivered. They would fly back to mother Africa.

Shanta said she learned the magic word in 1992 when she flew to Africa--changing planes at Heathrow Airport in London and landing in Zimbabwe. From a cardboard box, she unpacked her mountain bike, which was in pieces and had to be reassembled.

In a nature preserve in Botswana, Shanta said she pedaled amid hippopotamuses, elephants and zebras. And from the native Africans, she learned more folk tales.